Megan Server: facilitating interactive access to metagenomic data on a server

Abstract

Motivation: Metagenomic projects of large sequencing datasets (totaling hundreds of gigabytes of data). Thus, computational preprocessing and analysis are usually performed on a server rather than on a personal computer. The results of such analyses are then usually explored interactively. One approach is to use MEGAN, an interactive program that allows analysis and comparison of metagenomic datasets. Previous releases of MEGAN have required that the user first download the computed data from the server, an increasingly time-consuming process. Here we present Megan Server, a stand-alone program that serves MEGAN files to the web, using a RESTful API, facilitating interactive analysis without downloading the complete data. We describe a number of different application scenarios. Availability: Megan Server is provided as a standalone program tools/megan-server in the Megan6 software suite, available at https://software-ab.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/ download/megan6.